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I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-cr
by Traster 4y ago
I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises.
Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour in the crypto community. Even if you're curious about hearing how the latest project is justifying itself, you can't have a conversation about it because the entire conversation is dominated by memes and spam about other scam projects. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to say "No, actually this whole thing is just bad, and shouldn't be treated seriously". There's only so many times that you can humor the same lie. Web3, NFTs, DAOs, Altcoins, Smart Contracts, Stable coins. It's just the same grift repeated every 6 months. For every claim of how this tech could help someone there are thousands of people who have been harmed by scams using this tech.
- the_only_law 4y agoHeh I actually got an ad the other day about a lawsuit related to a certain notable name and a crypto scam.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago>It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.
- sharperguy 4y agoFunny because the bitcoin community hates NFTs just as much as the anti-crypto community.
- javert 4y agoThe bitcoin community hates NFTs and shitcoins much more than the anti-crypto community does. I'm basically an anti-crypto bitcoiner.
- HWR_14 4y agoThat's because NFTs are competing with BTC to lure in the newest money.
- reedjosh 4y agoIt's not about getting rich on Bitcoin, it's about taking back our choice of what money to use. Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap.
- HWR_14 4y agoI fail to see the difference between what I said and "Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap." Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto. I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn't start banks there.
- crypthrowaway1 4y ago> And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto. Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.
- DebtDeflation 4y agoExcept (at least in the case of BTC) that transaction will be permanently recorded on an indelible blockchain for everyone to see. Such security and privacy.
- trutannus 4y agoRight, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?
- isoprophlex 4y agoBecause artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)
- trutannus 4y ago> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.
- raspberry1337 4y agoYou're absolutely right, and I personally find 'modern' art unappealing and a scam (banan on wall 30k plz), but this is because it is being used a commodity in a rotten, oligarchic financial system where we bail out corrupt bankers at the cost of the people. With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.
- trutannus 4y ago> It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls. So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?
- rglullis 4y agoThis is like saying that you dismissed the web after you saw the 100th clone of the million dollar home page.
- perlgeek 4y agoAfter the 100th clone of the million dollar home page, I would have dismissed the web, if there hadn't been also been hundreds of good/useful/entertaining websites around at that point.
- rglullis 4y agoJust like that for some of us working with web3, the amount of useful applications that come up more than make up for all the stupidity going on with the "NFT art" space.
- falcolas 4y agoFWIW, I haven’t seen one “Web3” application. All I ever see is folks singing its potential from the rafters. Loudly. Perhaps the “web 3” evangelists can switch to show more of these apps, and the real world value they provide.
- rglullis 4y ago
- fuzzer37 4y agoNeither of those solve any real problems. This is literally the classic crypto "Solution looking for a problem"
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.) One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much. Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants. [1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it
- Capira 4y agoBitcoin is a groundbreaking invention. All the "cryptos" and NFTs are just scams.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y agowell, same could be said for Facebook. Only now, less than 20y later, we're all scrolling through endless feeds and digging comment section trenches of the latest culture wars
- kredd 4y agoI wouldn’t say 20 years later. Facebook was the way of connecting with people you just met even after 10 years after its inception. I would even say, pretty much everyone I knew had a Facebook account in 2010, and it delivered on the claims it made. Whether we agree with their mission is a different topic, but it certainly had an impact on the real world.
- antifa 4y agoFacebook is bad but unlike NFT it's utility exists.
- topranks 4y agoBitcoin is no different than the other “cryptos”. Most of them are literally forks of it.
- mr_spothawk 4y agobut, you're wrong. there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
- kayamon 4y agoYes it is -- its blockchain is longer. The blockchain with the longest proof-of-work is always the real blockchain, when given multiple competing blockchains to select from. This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.
- bombcar 4y agoNFTs really seem to have been the sharkjump - for whatever reason that seems to be the point where anti crypto started to really take off.
- sneak 4y ago> None of their claims have materially panned out. Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone. Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy. That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cryptocurrency is useful) is holding up fine.
- logifail 4y agoIn one corner we have types who want to send > arbitrarily large amounts of money and in the other corner we have the types who know about and enforce AML and KYC legislation. How is this possibly going to end well for the first group?
- sneak 4y agoIt turns out there are actually things that lawmakers don't really have the power to effectively ban, drugs and prostitution and gambling and cash transactions principally among them. A lot of people don't seem to integrate this fact. The practical power of a lawmaking body is not unlimited. There are certain things they simply cannot stop, no matter how many laws are passed. It won't "end" for either group, really. The latter will pass some laws, and the former will mostly ignore them, same as happened with hookers and blow. The people who inhabit both groups (the subset of lawmakers that like being able to pay for their hookers and blow with unreported bitcoin) will laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
- Jach 4y ago"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." --Malcolm Turnbull, Australia Prime Minister (2015-2018) There are some people who see attitudes like that in the government and think how can [things backed by math] survive a coordinated government onslaught that'll happen any year now? And then those that just look at such statements as the unlettered nonsense they are. Bitcoin lets you "be your own bank", independent of any KYC laws that may or may not apply to other banks in your jurisdiction.
- nikanj 4y agoOne of the claims has panned out: Plenty of people have gotten rich. To be fair, they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool. But many people have won the lottery.
- soco 4y agoThe same argument can be made about Ponzi or MLM schemes...
- rockostrich 4y agoAnd venture capitalism.
- nikanj 4y agoIf if quacks like a Ponzi scheme and makes early adopters rich like a Ponzi scheme..
- zamalek 4y ago> they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool. And that's where it all falls apart. Crypto-fanatics assume that "good for me" translates to "good for us." As we know, the crypto-rich only exist because others (usually many others) became crypto-broke and/or fiat-broke. At least, in general, people have no realistic expectation of winning the lottery. You also don't usually have people betting their entire life savings on the lottery. The analogy is only very loosely true.
- reedjosh 4y agoBitcoin fanatic here. No, it's literally about taking money printing away from corrupt governments worldwide.
- mr_spothawk 4y agoIt ^^ me tho. Separate Money from the State
- dcolkitt 4y ago> None of their claims have materially panned out. * Starknet is running a Turing complete VM using nothing but zero knowledge proofs. It's now possible and practical to trustlessly prove general purpose computation with O(logN) proof sizes. * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner. * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network.
- iamthirsty 4y ago> * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner. An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades. > * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network. Visa does 597 million consumer transactions per day. Not only is that magnitudes more, I would wage to guess that >75% of Solana's transactions aren't consumer purchases.[0][1] [0]: https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/bitcoin-volume-mastercard-visa https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/bitcoin-volume-maste... [1]: https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/Visa-Inc.-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2021-Operational-Performance-Data.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/...
- cableshaft 4y agoThey meant 65,000 transactions per second (they left that crucial word out). And that's the max that the Solana network can handle, not what it's currently doing all the time. So at it's maximum, the Solana network could handle 5.6 billion transactions per day. Visa only claims to handle 24,000 transactions per second, btw. [1] Actual approximate volume of transactions per month was around 500 million as of Nov 2021[2], so around 16.5 million transactions per day, or only about 5,800 transactions per second on average, so it can handle a lot more. It's handled just under 70 billion transactions to date[3] since it debuted in early 2020, so roughly 35 billion transactions each year for the two years it's been out. [1]: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/retail.html https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1280088/average-number-of-solana-transfers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1280088/average-number-o... [3]: https://explorer.solana.com/ https://explorer.solana.com/ EDIT: had to recheck and revise my math a bit, when working with that many zeros it gets easy to mistype something.
- smeea 4y agoBTC was the only way I was able to pay for hosting/domain for my non-commercial pet-project (~1,5 years of almost daily after hours development) after sanctions raised against the country I live in. This is my anecdotal experience (and no, I don't invest in crypto), but that's enough for me to not consider cryptocurrencies "just scum". P.S. Also I pay for VPN with it, because this is also the only way at the moment, and without it I cannot even read news I prefer.
- Traster 4y agoI'd be interested to hear who you bought the hosting from, I'm sure the US government would also like to hear who has been helping you evade sanctions. Sanctions are there for a reason.
- Spivak 4y agoYeah, "crypto is great because it allowed me and my co conspirators to do illegal things" isn't gonna be the most persuasive to governments or above-board businesses -- love the rebellious spirit though.
- notch656a 4y agoIt's doubtful seeking these hosting services were illegal in his own country. It's also doubtful the host has performed a crime if they had no idea the purchaser was sanctioned. It's questionable a law was even broken, as in many jurisdiction there is an element of 'mens rea' necessary.
- smeea 4y agoI dont know what you mean by "co conspirators" and "illegal things", but my project is site for cardboard game and 99+% of userbase is from EU/NA/SA. P.S. There are no sanctions prohibiting companies to sell hosting to me (by me I mean ordinary citizen with "toxic" passport), it is just VISA/Mastercard decision not to serve us so I dont have other means to pay.
- notch656a 4y ago
- dogman144 4y ago> this long protracted failure Have you seen the companies funding the pro-crypto crowd? The 3 people and a discord server projects get the most attention and generally act toxic, agreed. For the rest of the space, plenty of Fortune 500's investing in it for the long haul/"humoring the same lie."
- clarky07 4y ago>Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stupid, toxic, illegal, scammy behaviour are you talking about the internet or crypto? or maybe you were referring to finance. wall st? i get hundreds of scam emails a day, shall we get rid of email too? seriously, just because there are scams, doesn't mean that the internet, or wall st, or crypto are all worthless. that's just lazy and ignoring that scams are from people, and not from the tech. some people will use whatever means they have available to scam other people out of money. that doesn't remotely mean that all of crypto is a scam.